To All Who Are Hopeless With Birds


fat-brushed, inky strokes of our haiku.

They denote alien calm

or glamour, move in constellations

 

close enough to watch with the naked eye.

What we observe

is so much softer than the stars.

 

We know swallow, hawk, gull

but are lost in the everyday

chatter of birds common as chairs.

 

Feathered, hanging out in gangs,

warm as stolen time

an hour here, a night there, snatched,

 

held between our hands. Yet we are hopeless,

not naming what we serve

and mutely love and understand.

Stuttering, when asked : ‘Wren, linnet … finch’?

 

 

Hessian on her fingers, his skin a fever

of burning membrane,

she dries down her swan lover,

 

washes the oil, black on black, off his feathers

with suds, wearing rubber gloves,

her touch crudely human. The air shivers

 

and parts. The swan ambulance

vees in, skates water. Zeus’ doctors

are here with their stethoscopes.

 

He rests on the down stretcher. Someone else

has taken over. She falls back. The swan ambulance

takes off like an arrow, wheels once

 

on white wings over the sick town, bends

upwards and he’s gone. Left, she takes off her gloves.

There is tar on her wrist. It’s like that, the end.

 

 

 

 

All that is left is a woman slicing lemons,

crushing thyme. Silence has reefs

of absent voices to be avoided as heroes

steer clear of sirens. I might do this myself

 

if I could believe the will finds its own pace

that most things, even the curse loneliness

lays on us resolve themselves

but the fish’s eyes are full of tears.

 

All that is left is the lemon, the table, the blade

which gleams, dull as old scales. Outside

someone is standing at the window

sharpening his eyes.

 

 

 

Europe is a turtle’s back broken

open with bricks, with gunfire,

with love songs shifting in deep time,

borders snaking in slow motion.

 

My country is a worn out thing,

badly cut and overpriced.

I only ever owned the coast,

this beautiful indented line.

 

It’s time to shake it off, loosen

the ties, not the way some statue, Phedre

say, or Maeve , before the nation

she wore and loved became a shroud

 

stepped out of it, went bare-breasted

and clothed herself in rags of light -

such get-up made the gods feel bested

its ‘nothing more to lose’ a threat -

 

but quietly, the way the people of my place

have taken boats and planes and gone

and almost always come home

for weddings, funerals and fate.